Love, Light, Laughter and Chocolate – One Mom’s Journey: Be with me. Just for today..
A very hard read….I’ve never even thought of securing furniture…have any of you?
During all of this time while I was hurting I had so many people from all over the world coming together to wish my family wellness. I don’t know if they know how much the outpouring of their faith in me helped me to heal. It was amazing to go onto my social accounts and see all the positive wishes. Sometimes social outlets are used inappropriately, but other times such as this they are used to build someone up. Everyone always notices the irrelevant, shocking, bad, hurtful social quips, but it’s harder to find the great ones that people post.
Why is that? I have always wondered why the bad gets more attention than the good. The bad kids vs the good kids. Because of the “bad apples” we have so many laws. It saddens me to see how my children will grow up with so many regulations and laws that we as a people can’t even keep track of. I know I can’t. The seatbelt laws are constantly changing, and where you can drink and smoke, and sometimes even where you can talk.
We all know as parents that we focus on the bad that our children do rather than the good. I have decided this is due to how we process sensory information that annoys, frustrates, angers, and hurts us. I feel like the process of internalizing bad things reaches a sort of sensory threshold before the good; therefore, it takes more good events to occur for us to notice because our level of tolerance is higher than our level for noticing bad.
Now we can probably attribute this through the evolution of our flight vs fight response, because our system needs to have a way to recognize situations and people that are not appropriate for us to be around and/or involved in. This is just a self preservation mechanism. Since we have evolved this has worked wonders for us….we know not to go into the creepy forest or hang out with the creepy old man….or don’t trust the evil witch and so on….we can see this response in all of Disney’s movies. However, in today’s age this is not serving us well. Because technology has increased exponentially in just a short decade our ability to contact and be a part of such a large social network has caused multiple issues regarding social infrastructure. This includes our ability to over look certain events that if happened in front of our face we probably would not react too, but online we take huge measure to make sure we post our every little thought on the matter.
Don’t get upset, I do this all the time; however, over the last few months I have tried to dial it down and while it is very difficult it can be done. I have a few rules that I live by now. I don’t post my thoughts on another person’s account, and I don’t tell me deepest darkest secrets on my account, nor do I respond with horrible retorts to other people’s comments. I also expect these rules to be followed on my page, and if they cannot then those person’s will be removed from my social media account no matter which account it is.
I have been working towards this with my children as well…making sure I notice all the good they do in this world and not all the bad! I think this is terribly important as a parent, and during our social skills group we went to during last summer we talked about this a lot; however, unfortunately it wasn’t until after the car crash did I truly see how much I need to make sure I follow this line of thinking.
My daughter was not scared for herself, but for her brother and for me. She was lil momma at the time…so beautiful…so endearing….I need to make sure that I never forget that..and never take her absolute and instantaneous love for me for granted….
This is true for my son, but you also have to remember he’s moderately autistic, so he functions on such a different level than his sister.
Are there any ways that you make sure you show your children and loved ones how much you appreciate the good in them?
If so let me know!!!!
~lenajeanne
So on Thursday me and the kids drove from Glenwood, AR to Lexington, KY which with stops takes us about 10 hrs….and we stop A LOT. However, due to the over foot of snow and 3-4 inches of ice UNDER the snow it took us 15 hrs to get to Lexington, and immediately as we got in we went straight to Urgent Treatment Center. Selena has the flu!!!! UGH….then we go home, unpack and wait until Walgreens filled the prescription. I had left at 3AM in the morning and at 1AM the next day was still up going to go get my daughter’s tamiflu prescription…if that’s not love dunno what is! 😉 Sometimes though there are times that being a single mom becomes harder than when I was with their father, and this is one of them. He would have gone to get the prescription for me so i can get the kids ready for bed….but alas it’s just me..so I have to be mom, judge, jury, dad, doctor, therapist, and so many more hats……it’s exhausting….
However, the next day it was time to unload the car and take it back to the rental place. What I did that morning is a little hazy due to a slight concussion that I received yesterday, but I do know I took the car to Hertz rental and on the way home while the Hertz driver was dropping us off we got into a car accident. It was horrible….I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember..hello I hit my head! lol I do remember the side airbags deploying and feeling a horrendous pain in my head. Then I rushed to grab the kids out of the car in case another car hit us and got my daughter to safety first, but then i couldn’t get my son out and he was grabbing his stomach and crying very hard. Eventually we got him to safety and waiting or the ambulance. They came and took my son and my daughter and I walked the two blocks to my house and picked up my car. Again, I’m a single mom with no family in Lexington. I should have been taken in the ambulance, but I had to prepare myself for a way to get home..so I had to take the car!
We get there and by the end of the day my son has bruising from the seatbelt, Selena has whiplash and swelling of the muscles around the neck and chemical burns from the side airbag. I on the other hand have ripped muscles in my arm, severe whiplash, really bruised right legs, sore spine, a concussion, and apparently a tumor on my thyroid.
Yes, I said a tumor on my thyroid. Apparently on the CT scan they found a tumor on my thyroid. So, next week I have to have an ultrasound and take it from there.
So see there are some blessings in disguise. It would have taken years for them to find the tumor unless I got sick from it..and who’s to say that I’m not already. I’m having the worse time trying to lose weight and have no energy at all. I even went to the doctor for it, but they said that it costs hundreds of dollars to get all the thyroid testing done, so because I’m a student with bad insurance I said naw I’ll deal with it. Now, I can’t “deal with it” now I have to figure out what it is. GREAT!!!! JUST GREAT!!!!
So the beauty in the bad is that my tumor was found! What a blessing this horrible crash was. You always have to see the beauty in the bad; otherwise, your mind is open to ugly possibilities such as depression, bad thoughts, hurtful feelings, and unwise choices. I choose to see this scary happening as a way for me to become better and not get really sick! I hope we can continue this outlook throughout the 2013 year!
Have you guys already started thinking about New Years Resolutions? I don’t do them, but I love to hear other people’s!
~LenaJeanne
~Living without the reservations of fear!
We all have a place that we call home, whether or not they are “good” places or “bad” places they are still there.
We have also all heard the saying, “It’s not the place, it’s the people.”
We all also know the saying “you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out off the girl”
This is very true…all of it! Most people don’t realize how country I am….how incredibly southern and hospitable my family truly is. How amazing we can be compared to other families I’ve been around. We all have our problems that is very true. We all have our hidden secrets and things we don’t want anyone else to know, but at the end of the day blood is thicker than water.
Like I’ve stated before I come from a very small town of 2,000 people. We only had one black family here growing up, and though I was never raised as a racist (my stepfamily is from Brownsville, TX and hispanic) I didn’t know how they would react to meeting my current and hopefully last ever boyfriend. T came up Friday night and stayed at my mom’s house and Saturday was my mom’s Christmas party. This is SUCH a fun event for the family…we have close to 75 people in attendance and all the ladies bring a Christmas tree ornament to play dirty santa with. However, could you imagine meeting your girlfriend of 1.5 year’s family ALL at one time? Seriously that has to be scarier than well anything I can think of….he took it like a pro! lol Everybody loved T….I was even told that he was a “good” man…….Imagine that…a white town in southern Arkansas lovingly accepting an interracial couple? Who would have thought that?
This is my point that I try to convey with my blog…..stereotypes is just that….a stereotype whether it involves a single mom, a person with autism, a mentally handicapped individual, an African American, a European, and/or anyone else. You can’t judge someone by identifiers that are just descriptors, because we are not static objects. We were not ever and are now not even created inside a vacuum without any outside forces bending us and sculpting us. We instead are forged through our own personal enigmatic experiences that we react to with our own unique actions, thoughts, and feelings. Who each one of us are is not dependent upon our surroundings, but on how we react to our surroundings. Each person can be measured by their uninhibited responses……….My family has definitely risen above southern white stereotypes.
I’m asking everyone to go home this season…go home and rise above who you even think you are……come home inside yourself and see others in a new light. Use the perspective you had as a child. One that is not ruined by life’s hardships and personal failures…one that is not riddled with potholes of regret. Come home and tell me all about it.
I know that in the end you will find MORE peace in coming home than in living in today’s failures!
~LenaJeanne
PS…..today’s reservations were overcome with a foot of snow!!!!
Foot of snow
So we have almost a foot of snow here in southern AR…It hasn’t snowed here in about 80 years on christmas day! What a miracle…what a perfect year…and I’m here spending it with my family!
Here’s a bit of christmas cheer to send your way….a recipe for Snow Ice Cream!!!
A big bowl of clean (not yellow) snow…..
some milk
some vanilla (half pet milk/half whole)
some sugar
a pinch of salt
Hello Everyone,
I have decided to not post anything for awhile. I was going to post a daily memorial for each shooting victim….but in recent events with the public targeting families like mine I have decided to take a break from the internet. The outpoor of ugliness against families with autism has been something that has been very hard to bear in a time where we need to come together for the sake of those precious loved ones.
I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and I will see you on the flip side.
God Bless….Love you guys!!!
~LenaJeanne
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